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Hello, I'm posting this to try to get help for a developer of 3D Fish Screensavers. Here is his problem:

The problem is not creating the normals, or pointing them the way I want - I can do that manually in Lightwave. The problem is in exporting the object as a DirectX file which uses those normals. The DStorm plugin (which is really the only game in town), throws away all your handcrafted normals, and calculates its own.

This means that I have to spend many hours on each object going through the DirectX text file and figuring out which of the thousands of points need to have their normals flipped, then enter new numbers. I can't just see which points they were in Lightwave, because the order gets changed when I save it as a DirectX file. So I have to match up the x,y,and z coordinates to make sure I'm dealing with the right one. I can't just do a simple text search, because the decimal point is in a different place between the Lightwave and DirectX files. So, I locate the proper point in the file, let's say it's point #209. Then I have to count down 209 lines in the list of normals, and change the Y value to -1.000000. That's one...only 80 more to go. Of course, if I need to make any changes to the object in Lightwave, I have to do this all over again. Assuming I'm not so depressed by the unfolding dramas in the Forum that I can even work that day.

I can't describe how frustrating this is. WHY would the DStorm programmers write new code to calculate normals, when the ones I want are RIGHT THERE in Lightwave along with the x,y,z position of the point? I have tried writing to them (they are a Japanese company), but I just got a short reply to the effect of "Yes, that is how it works".

If anyone knows a work around or solution for this, that would be awesome. Thanks

Tim

(A link to the deveopers forum site)
http://www.feldoncentral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3675&page=43